The College Fix

Later this semester at Harvard, students will pause from studying things like philosophy, history, or the sciences, in order to celebrate something called  “Incest-Fest.”

Incest-Fest is, essentially, a campus party where making out and hooking up with as many people as possible is the goal. It gets the “incest” name because the event is open only to residents of Kirkland house–one of Harvard’s undergraduate residences. Thus, students who are living together (as if they were members of the same family, get it?? Incest? So funny, right?) are having sex with one another.

America, this is your best and brightest. Are you proud?

One Harvard student, junior Samantha Berstler, wrote an article for the Harvard Crimson this week suggesting that making a joke out of incest for the sake of a college party maybe isn’t in the best taste:

I am writing all this to explain that I am not only objecting to the name “IncestFest” because it is offensive and insensitive—although, indeed, it is, and it saddens me that this is not immediately obvious. I am writing this because incest is notoriously invisible and leaves its victims burdened with shame and humiliation for the rest of their lives. This invisibility and this shame are directly enforced by the myths of incest as “sexy” and “misunderstood”—myths propagated by using “incest” as slang for “sex with someone I’m living with” and by dances that institutionalize this meaning. The name “IncestFest” is not sexy or cute or clever.

As of the time of this writing, there were two reader comments below her article, which I’ll copy here so you can get an idea how elevated and intelligent the conversation at Harvard is on this subject:

Commenter Marcus Bunny had this to say, “Don’t go and let other people have a sick time getting laid.” Another commenter, calling himself Kirkland2013, had this remarkable insight: “Looks like someone needs to get some action at IncestFest.”

This is what passes for enlightened conversation in the morally bankrupt halls of Harvard.

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